Brad’s eyes were wide open. He was conscious, but unresponsive. He could hear Ranya’s and Phil’s voices; he could hear them clearly. He knew where he was, vaguely. He was on the Molly M, looking up at the blank cockpit ceiling. Ranya was squeezing and rubbing his hands. Her hands felt very warm on his. Ranya’s voice sounded far away. He heard her crying. She said to someone else, “Don’t lie to me! I know what’s going on! He needs surgery; he’s got internal bleeding! We’ve got to take him to Fort Belvoir right now, or he won’t make it! We’ve got to call them now, now! We’ve got to have an ambulance waiting! We’ve got to do it now!”
He heard Phil’s voice. It sounded like he was crying too. He said, “Ranya, we’ll be stopped out here if we call ahead. They’ll stop us before we even get there. They’ll hold us out here and wait until he dies. I know them, I know how they work! We can’t call ahead. We’ll leave him on the dock, and then we’ll call.” Brad understood what Carson was really saying, and he calmly accepted it. I’m dying, no matter what. There’s no point in all of us being arrested, and then disappearing forever into some detention camp, or worse. Some of us have to get away. We have to be free, free to tell our story. Our story can’t die because of one person.
Ranya, sounding so far away, screamed, “I don’t care, I don’t care about that! I don’t believe you! I don’t care about anything else—I’m going to call anyway!” Then she disappeared. Brad understood that she was fighting for him. She would go into the pilothouse and get on channel 16. She would call a Mayday on the Molly M. She would bring the police and the Coast Guard straight to the Molly M, to increase my chances for life.
Phil called after her, “Don’t, Ranya, don’t do it! This isn’t about one person! It’s not about any of us! If that’s all it was, I wouldn’t care either.” Then his voice trailed away, so far away…
Under his back, the diesel engine changed its rhythm, slowed from its steady rumble, paused, and then got back up to speed. He tried to turn his head toward the pilothouse but couldn’t. He rolled his head to the port side, and saw a somehow recognizable soldier sitting on the gunnel, smiling wistfully at him. The soldier was wearing a woolen uniform and a crushed forage cap, with a rolled-up blanket slung across his chest. After a time, he said, “Bradley, if it’s of any consolation, I, too, was conscripted into service. And, as the good Lord knows, I didn’t want to die either. But our fate is not often in our hands.”
Brad tried to turn his head away, to blink away the apparition, but when he looked again the soldier had a companion sitting beside him, wearing a three-cornered cap. He closed his eyes again. When he opened them, another phantom was sitting on the other side of the Civil War soldier, dressed in a camouflage uniform and a floppy jungle boonie hat. The newest soldier spoke softly. He said, “Don’t worry, Brad, we’ve all done it. It’s nothing you can’t handle. You’re good to go, bro.”
Then the side of the Molly M was filled with soldiers and sailors, sitting and standing, wearing uniforms from every war, all smiling at him knowingly. The Civil War soldier said, “Be not afraid, Bradley, for you are among friends. Your comrades await you around the campfires. They have laid you a warm bedroll. Now, come and rest among your brothers.”
Across the dark Potomac, Brad could see the beckoning lights of their fires, strung like a familiar necklace along the shore and, above them, Orion the Hunter standing watch.
Epilogue
“Zo, you have been to town, ya? To Santa Marta? Did you take zee autobus, oder zee taxi?” The German who asked the questions was wearing a cone-shaped Vietnamese rice paddy hat, undoubtedly as proof that he had sailed through Southeast Asia. It was his way of announcing that he was a hard-core world cruiser, who was not afraid to sail on troubled waters—like the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Phil Carson was not impressed. He’d seen plenty of those rice paddy hats, back in the day.
The forty-something German’s red tank top couldn’t quite stretch over his beer gut to meet his black Speedo bathing suit. In a million years I’d never go ashore like that, Carson thought, not even to go to the beach. I’d rather be shot. For the twenty kilometer bus ride to Santa Marta, he’d worn khaki slacks despite the tropical heat, boat shoes and a blue polo shirt with a collar. While the slovenly German was sweating and unshaven and looked like a bum, Carson had adapted a neatly trimmed goatee and moustache combination with a military length haircut, and he looked more like a Spanish aristocrat.
“None of your stinking business, fat boy,” was what Carson wanted to say in reply but, instead, he said nothing and continued to load his Avon inflatable. He muttered unintelligibly to himself in order to avoid a conversation with the lard-bellied Kraut sailor. The nosy German was coming ashore, Carson was going back out to the anchorage, and they had crossed paths on the dock of the Club Rapanga. The other side of the hundred-foot-long dock was dominated by an idle thirty-foot scuba-diving excursion boat.
In spite of the perfect climate and stunning local scenery, Club Rapanga was getting almost no overland foreign tourist trade. This was due to Colombia’s reputation for brutal violence coming from communist guerrillas, drug cartels, paramilitary groups and common street criminals. In the near-total absence of conventional tourists, intrepid but always frugal yachties were being welcomed as better than no tourists at all. For $25 a month, cruising sailors could tie up their dinghies at the gated and guarded Club Rapanga dock, and spend their money in the bars, have lunch or dinner, get their laundry done, or telephone for a cab. A variety of illegal drugs and prostitutes could also be arranged for anyone who wanted to walk on the wild side, in a country where you could get killed even on the tame side for a few pesos and a bag full of glue.
The German lived on a rust-bleeding fifty-foot steel schooner, which had already been anchored in the sheltered cove of Playa Rapanga when they had arrived two weeks ago. The German had a skinny Canadian boy of about twenty years old on board, who was either crewing for him, hitching a ride, or sharing his bunk. Carson didn’t want to know any more about them. They were both wretched specimens, and an actual Canadian was the very last kind of sailor he wanted to run into.
Fortunately for escaping from this type of over-friendly pier-side interrogation, a significant percentage of long distance sailors were anti-social to the point of rudeness, and more than a few were downright nuts. So it wasn’t far out of the ordinary for the German to meet a skipper who mumbled to himself and ignored his questions, as he loaded his groceries and his beer into his inflatable. Carson climbed aboard and started the motor, untied the dock lines and took off, still grumbling incoherently. He hoped to come off as just another flaky cruiser, and nobody that would stick in the German’s mind.
Ranya would stick in the German’s mind though, assuming that he was into girls, and not boys like the pierced and tattooed college-age Canadian kid on his schooner.
Ranya stuck in everybody’s mind; she had become an undeniably beautiful young woman. But although the young men followed her closely with their eyes, they left her alone when she walked the beaches and the two narrow palm-lined streets of Playa Rapanga. The word was out about this chica linda: she was not one to touch, or even to call after in an insulting way. Not her, and not her father, who was known and protected by the Dongando brothers, who controlled Playa Rapanga and regions beyond.
Carson steered the Avon out towards the anchorage, past the rows of open wooden fishing boats anchored close in to shore. The big Spanish ketch had left while he was on his day trip in the air-conditioned bus over to Santa Marta. Now, the German schooner, the Aussie catamaran and the French sloop were the only other foreign yachts remaining in the anchorage, their national flags flying from their sterns.
Garimpeiro was anchored further out, nearly a quarter mile from the beach, so that the others would have less reason to pass by or visit in their dinghies. Carson returned a wave to the attractive blond mother of the Aussie family on the big white catamaran as he passed them, feeling pangs of regret and a little jealousy over their manif
est happiness, and his roads not taken.
The young French couple on the thirty-foot Beneteau sloop studiously ignored his passing, as usual. When they had learned that the crew of Garimpeiro was “Anglais-Canadien,” they had simply ceased to exist for them. This was perfectly suitable to Carson, who had no use for Frogs anyway.
Even as a newly-papered “Anglais-Canadien,” Carson could not get used to the red and white maple leaf flag tied to their backstay wire, or to seeing Toronto, Ontario painted on the transom beneath “Garimpeiro.” He had chosen the new name while Guajira’s white hull was being painted blue in the boatyard in Barranquilla. Ranya still wasn’t talking much then. He picked the new name himself as a subtle remembrance of Brad Fallon, who was in his own way a garimpeiro, a free-spirited treasure seeker. Like most garimpeiros, Brad had tried mightily, but failed to reach his own El Dorado. Carson and Ranya both appreciated the subtle echo of Guajira remaining in the new name.
He hoped Ranya would be talking today; they had so much to discuss. Their sleek cobalt-blue sloop rode nervously at anchor facing northeast into the strong afternoon trade wind. Some chop was building up, but it was not blowing quite hard enough to make whitecaps inside the reef. The gold-blue-red striped Colombian courtesy flag, flying from the spreaders halfway up the mast, was whipping straight back.
Even from across the anchorage, he could see that the wind generator on its pole above the stern was racing; its blades were a shining blur in the afternoon sun. Combined with the output of the solar panel, there would be a surplus of electricity and plenty of ice for their sunset Cuba Libres, with no need to run the diesel to keep the batteries up.
Ranya was on deck and, as he steered the Avon closer, he could see that she was leaning far out over the side with the compound hunting bow, taking aim at some doomed fish. Deep water fish often wandered over the reefs to the outer fringe of Playa Rapanga’s half-moon bay, where Garimpeiro was anchored in forty feet of turquoise water. Sometimes these fish rested and sought refuge in the shade under her blue hull, never suspecting that the real danger lurked just above the water in the form of a cruelly barbed steel arrowhead.
A few hundred yards from the boat he eased off on the throttle, not wanting to spook Ranya’s quarry or break her concentration. She was wearing her black one-piece tank suit, the high-cut one that showed her legs right up to her hips on the side. It was one of the bathing suits she had found on the boat, one of Brad’s gifts already purchased in anticipation of pretty amigas he would never meet. Sometimes Ranya didn’t leave the boat for days at a time while they were at anchor, except to take the inflatable to go snorkeling or spear fishing on the reefs. During these periods her attire only changed from one swimsuit to another, with a t-shirt thrown on after the sudden tropical sunsets.
He watched her release the string, remaining motionless. Then, she placed the compound bow with its attached reel down on the deck, and stood to haul in the short line hand-over-hand. He couldn’t tell what Ranya had just shot but, whatever it was, he would fillet it and they would eat it for dinner, unless it was a barracuda. For some reason lately she was killing big barracudas, both with the hunting bow from on deck and with the spear gun under water. She wasn’t killing them for their meat, which was unsafe to eat, but for their long and sharp teeth, which she was daily adding to a necklace on a white string.
Carson encouraged her bow-fishing, and not only for the meat that she put on the table. The locals in their wooden boats saw the wild girl shooting arrows with her exotic-looking compound bow, and they gave Garimpeiro a wide berth. Likewise, on the few dusty streets of Playa Rapanga, they saw her necklace of barracuda’s teeth and the long knife in its sharkskin sheath hanging on her hip, and they stayed out of her way. (In case they still failed to heed the signs, she carried her father’s .45 pistol in her black fanny pack, which she still wore to the front. This was Colombia, after all.)
She stood on the cabin top by the mast as Carson approached in the Avon, smiling proudly as she held up her skewered catch with her hands on each end of the arrow. As usual, the fish had been speared from above, straight through its head, dead before it left the water. It was a short, thick fish, weighing about ten or twelve pounds.
Three months of Caribbean sun and saltwater had further tanned her skin and lightened her hair. Today it was unfettered and lifting on the breeze, glowing where the sun passed through it. As he approached in the inflatable, she came down from the cabin top and laid the dead fish on the top of the lazarette locker, on the little aft-deck behind the cockpit. This was where he always filleted her catches.
It was easy to understand why the teenaged boys on the beach grinned at her when she passed by and called her Shakira, after the hugely popular Colombian singing star. The resemblance was definitely there, both physically, and in her brooding intensity. The local teens might have been surprised to discover that, in fact, Ranya Bardiwell shared Shakira Ripoll’s Lebanese ancestry.
And now Ranya was herself a teenager once again, at least on paper. She had been reborn as Carson’s own daughter; a seventeen-year-old Canadian citizen from Toronto named Diana Williams. It had been easier to obtain her new Canadian passport as his underage child, and it more suitably explained their relationship together aboard Garimpeiro. Together, they had created a basic personal history “legend” to go with their new identities, but it was thin, with no verifiable backstops in Canada. This is why they above all avoided real Canadians, such as the German skipper’s young crew. Genuine Canadians were the most likely to sniff out the falsity of their purchased identities.
Carson pulled the Avon along the sailboat’s starboard side and tossed Ranya the bow line to cleat off. “What did you catch?” he asked, standing in the rubber boat as it pitched in the chop alongside the far steadier hull of their forty-four foot sloop. He hoped she would feel like talking today. This had been a fifty-fifty proposition the last few weeks. Sometimes she communicated only in single syllables for days.
“I’m not sure. Some kind of sea bass, maybe. I’ll have to look it up in the book.”
“Looks sort of like a grouper. It’ll be a nice change from dorado.” He passed up the canvas bags with their fresh provisions and other purchases, and the wooden crate of beer bottles. Then he climbed through the lifeline gate into the cockpit and sat down on the long blue cushion. The sun was too low behind them for the blue canvas Bimini awning to provide any relief from its slanting rays, but the sea breeze was sufficient to keep them comfortable. They were both so used to the sailboat’s motion that they didn’t notice it.
“How was the ride into Santa Marta?” she asked.
“Pretty smooth. They cranked the A/C down to about sixty, but it was nice being cold for a change. There was one checkpoint halfway there, but we didn’t have to get out. The soldiers came aboard and checked ID’s. They barely looked at my passport.”
“Just like back in the states,” she commented cynically.
“Yeah, it seems like there’s no escaping checkpoints anymore. Except on the ocean.” They had sailed non-stop from Virginia to Colombia in three weeks, without seeing a single Coast Guard vessel, not even in the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti. The hurricane season timing of their voyage meant that they listened with extreme trepidation to every hourly single-sideband weather report, but they never experienced winds above thirty knots.
Ranya stood over one of the tightly packed canvas carrying bags, peering inside. “What, no iguana eggs?” Pickled iguana eggs were a local delicacy sold in roadside stands, and had become somewhat of a running joke between them.
“Nope, sorry, no lizard eggs today. But I found you something else. Colombian Oreo cookies.”
“You did? Now you’re talking! Dig ‘em out. You know I’m severely junk food deprived.”
“Yes ma’am. You just fetch me up a cold Eagle, and I’ll hand over the fake Oreos.”
While she was below, rock music burst from the cockpit speakers, Tom Petty singing about an America
n girl. Ranya returned to the cockpit with two open beer bottles in foam insulators, and set one down for herself. She slowly held out Carson’s bottle of Cerveza Aguila, and then they did an elaborate exchange like a pair of nervous crack dealers, mock-cautiously extending their halves of the bargain an inch at a time. Then, they simultaneously snatched what they wanted from each other, and broke out laughing.
He loved to see her happy again; her broad smile, the dimples under her cheeks, the way her amber eyes lit up… He turned away to face the beach, so she wouldn’t see his tears forming. Cottonball trade-wind clouds punctuated the azure sky as they marched toward the west, above the dry foothills behind the verdant palms of Playa Rapanga.
Ranya tore open the bag and shoved one whole cookie into her mouth with exaggerated moans, lip-smacking and eye-rolling. “You have no idea, no idea at all, how I have been craving Oreo cookies. No idea. Thank you so, so, much for remembering!”
Carson took a long pull from his ice-cold Aguila beer. “I can give up cigarettes, but don’t ever ask me to give up beer. After a long, hard day of being Canadian, this is really kind of nice.” Actually he had been forced to re-quit cigarettes cold turkey, because there were none aboard Guajira when they had raised anchor in Virginia and fled out to the Atlantic. “Cold beer, a pretty girl, a sailboat in the tropics… You know, a man could get used to this life. Oh, hey, I almost forgot! I found a copy of last Sunday’s New York Times in Santa Marta. It has a few articles about the Senate hearings.”
“Chuck it overboard. I wouldn’t believe that rag if they said the sun was coming up tomorrow morning.” She was talking with her mouth full of Oreos, washing them down with cerveza, and neither of them cared.
He pulled the Times out of one of the canvas bags and partially unfolded the front section, just enough for her to read it without the wind tearing it from his hands. The side headline above the fold read, “President Stands Firm On Banned Guns.”
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